411: Cultural People

On Friday, Chicago Filmmakers will host the work of local filmmaker Adele Friedman, who will show nine films that span from her 1983 portrait of her grandmother and father (“Sarah and Norman”) to a couple working in a kitchen in Paris in 2008 (“Pauline and Patrick, Le Marais, Paris”). Friedman’s work revolves around the use of portraiture, focusing on friends. “My work is often about cultural people, and how their lives are informed by their cultural interiors and artistic tastes,” Friedman says. “They surround themselves with what moves them.” It is a decided break from the celebrity-centric media we are usually saturated with, and Friedman aims to show how her subjects (oftentimes, those in the art world) cannot just stop being who they are when they are away from it all. “People don’t leave their culture at the museum or the office; they bring it home and live with it,” the filmmaker says. “It’s part and parcel of the daily fabric of their lives.” (Peter Cavanaugh)